Los Angeles, CA: As University of California regents prepared to meet last week, animal liberationists escalated their campaign on behalf of imprisoned non-human primates being tortured to death in UC laboratories. An anonymous communiqué received by the North American Animal Liberation Press Office on Thursday claims that an activist vandalized the home of notorious primate abuser Stephen Lisberger, whose lab has been cited by the Federal Drug Administration for violations of the Animal Welfare(sic) Act. Combined with additional acts of sabotage at UC campuses in Berkeley and Los Angeles, activists appear to be responding to years of unsuccessful attempts at dialogue with school officials by mainstream activists, who are now themselves being imprisoned using unethical legal attacks. A Los Angeles protester faces sentencing Tuesday for purportedly violating a UCLA-obtained restraining order in which she was neither named nor made aware of, simply for distributing flyers decrying the imprisonment and murder of non-human primates.

The current communiqué reads, in part:
Just after sunrise on Halloween, a sole trick or treater descended on the home of University of California-San Francisco primate vivisector Stephen Lisberger. As Stephen and his wife Chieko slept in San Francisco, tubes of superglue were used to fill his front door locks. UCSF vivisectors and officials shall consider this a gentle halloween prank, but this is just the beginning. We will increase our level of tactics as long as non-human primates and other animals are tortured to death at the hands of those driven by profit and as long as the University of California shows a complete disregard for the suffering of the non-human prisoners.

UCSF -- you've already had to pay out over $90,000 for violations of the Animal Welfare Act for Lisberger's experiments on primates that include fluid deprivation, gluing metal coils to their eyelids, restraint chairs and invasive surgeries. How's thousands, even millions more, in damage to the researchers property and your school sound?

Vivisection, or experimentation on animals, is not only an evil that is perpetrated on millions of innocent animals, but is also scientifically fraudulent. While 20,000 children worldwide die every month from the effects of unclean water, vivisectors in University of California laboratories are wasting money addicting primates to crystal methamphetamines, gluing coils to the globes of their eyes and doing other inhumane and painful experiments on other species of animals, including cats, dogs, pigs, mice and birds. In a civilized society, and with better alternatives to animal experimentation, US academia should be on the fore-front of good, solid, non-animal-based research that could save the lives of children and adults alike. Instead, greedy "scientists" continue business as usual by mutilating non-human animals; it seems that until they begin doing ethical and scientifically-valid non-animal research, vivisectors will continue to be a target for those who are moral, courageous and heroic.

UC bureaucrats recently forced AB 2296 on legislators and the California public, targeting the free-speech activities of legal animal-protectionist picketers. (A complete copy of the law is available here.) In an increasingly repressive environment where civil rights are being taken away from legal protesters, underground activities seem only to be increasing. Legal picketers are complaining of harassment, intimidation and arrest for marching on public sidewalks, chanting and even handing leaflets describing what a vivisector does to animals; they feel as if they are being targeted by the state unfairly and have filed a federal law suit against UCLA and it's captain of police, John Adams. Despite increased police repression, there is ample evidence to show that the campaign to stop primate vivisection at UCLA is continuing by both legal and illegal activities.